Non-traditional Religions Research Articles

Reconceptualizing Cult Coercion and Withdrawal: A Comparative Analysis of Divorce and Apostasy

Continuing debates center on the causes of cult conversion and the mental and emotional effects of involvement. In recent years, expanded credibility has been given to the brainwashing or coercive-persuasion model by psychiatrists, psychologists, and psychiatric social workers widely influencing the courts, media, and public opinion. Members of nontraditional religions are likened to prisoners of war (POWs) and are depicted as victims of manipulative behavioral conditioning practices that produce special cult-induced symptoms. However, clinical evidence has been contradictory and empirical support has not been forthcoming. Consequently, study was conducted to explore the attitudes and experiences offormer members of three new religious cults (Unification Church, Hare Krishna, and Children of God/Family of Love) to assess the effects of participation and withdrawal. Focusing on disengagement, this study provides comparative analysis of divorce and apostasy to demonstrate more model for explaining commitment, disaffection, and withdrawal. At the threshold of the 1990s, controversies surrounding involvement in unconventional religious movements continue to raise important legal, ethical, and scientific questions about the causes of conversion and the mental and emotional effects of participation. During the last decade, the anticult movement has enjoyed increased professionalization, a process in which research and the roles of psychiatrists, psychologists and social workers have become more salient (Robbins 1988:6; see also Bromley & Shupe 1987). Expanded credibility has been given to the brainwashing or coercive-persuasion model by psychiatrists and mental health professionals who argue that involvement in nontraditional religions stems from manipulative psychological practices inducing ego destruction and overstimulation of the nervous system, resulting

Communal and Associational Churches

The inadequacy of the church-sect typology for the analysis of the changes taking place in the structure of traditional religious groups within urban-industrial societies has made necessary the development of new conceptual tools for the study of the processes and directions of change in such groups. One such typology is derived from the distinction between community and association, and a typological continuum extending from communal to associational churches is proposed. While churches may develop in either direction along this continuum, it is to be expected that churches will become more associational in the urban environment. This model has been applied to the analysis of a city center church in Birmingham, England. It has become increasingly obvious in recent years that the church-sect typolo?gy, even in its developed and modified forms, is inadequate for the analysis and classification of the various types of religious organizations in modern western societies. Unfortunately, few attempts have yet been made to construct models which use other dimensions of organizational structure or of religiosity as the basis for analysis. The development of the concept of cult has provided the basis for the analysis of syncretistic and non-traditional religions within a Christian society (Nelson, 1968a; 1968b:649-81; 1969a; 1969 b:152-60; Jackson and Jobling, 1968) but models for the analysis of the types of Christian religious groups remain to be developed. The basis for a model which should prove useful in the classification of churches, in the analysis of the role of the churches within society, and in predicting the form of adaptation to social change that churches may take can be found in the concepts of community and association defined by MacIver (MacIver and Page, 1955) and derived ultimately from the concepts of Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft, formulated by Toennies (1957). RURAL-URBAN DIFFERENCES Further bases for the development of such a model are to be found in Cooley's concept of primary groups (1909), in the work of Redfield (1947), and in the now somewhat neglected work of the ecological school whose work was largely